Have nothing to do with the [evil] things that people do, things that belong to the darkness. Instead, bring them out to the light... [For] when all things are brought out into the light, then their true nature is clearly revealed...

Tag Archives: Jobs

This article first appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Saturday, March 7, 2015:

North American Free Trade Agreement logo

The employment report from the Labor Department on Friday was hailed as more evidence that the worst from the Great Recession is now in the rear view mirror, and receding. The unemployment rate in February dropped to 5.5 percent, lower than economists were predicting, while job growth added nearly 300,000 jobs, pushing the streak of gains of 200,000-plus new jobs per month out to a full year, the longest such streak since 1995.

The news caused stocks to lose more than one percent of their value, as Wall Street expected the robust numbers to hasten the day when the Fed would increase interest rates, potentially slowing the sluggish economy even further. Investors needn’t worry: Friday’s report was a head-fake.

This first appeared at The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Monday, February 2, 2015:

Taking a page not only out of the Super Bowl on Sunday, but also out of the statistical study proving that offense is more effective in winning than defense, Obama is offering a grievously offensive and logically indefensible budget for 2016 today (Monday, 2/2/15). His proposal is morally offensive in that he proposes to take money earned by some and give it to others. It is logically flawed in that it will increase deficits each year for the next ten years, adding yet another $6 trillion to the $18 trillion already extant (up from the $10 trillion when he took office in 2008). It will limit job growth, stifle innovation, keep tax lawyers and accountants busy into eternity, and do nothing for his favorite target: the beleaguered middle class.

None of that matters. It’s all for show and to keep the Republicans on the defensive by couching his proposal in terms that only progressives could love:

On the day after Super Bowl Sunday, President Obama, knowing that an offensive strategy most likely wins the game while a purely defensive strategy guarantees losing it, is challenging the new Republican-controlled Congress with his offensive 2016 budget proposal starting October 1. He is daring them to play defense without appearing to favor the ultra-rich, so-called trust-fund babies, and corporations parking billions in earnings abroad to avoid high rates of corporate taxation here.

Besides, in a preview of this strategy on Saturday during his radio address, the president said he thinks

This article first appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Friday, January 9, 2015:

In a letter to his union workers at U.S. Steel’s pipe and tube plant in Lorain, Ohio, Tom McDermott, president of United Steelworkers local 1104, was blunt:

The company has suddenly lost a great deal of business because of the recent downturn in the oil industry. What appeared just a few short weeks ago as being a productive year … has most abruptly turned sour.

So sour that U.S. Steel is idling 614 or its 700 workers in Lorain, along with all 142 of its workers in its Houston, Texas plant.

This is likely to be just the beginning. Even as U.S. Steel poured hundreds of millions into its gamble that producing “oil country tubular goods,” or OCTG, would reverse years of losses, other steel makers have done the same:

This article first appeared at The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Friday, January 9, 2015:

On Tuesday, when Mercedes-Benz’s North American Chairman Stephen Cannon finally confirmed the rumors swirling around his company’s headquarters in Montvale, New Jersey, that he was going to move it to Atlanta, Georgia, he didn’t tell the whole truth:

New Jersey has been a wonderful home to our U.S. operations for our first 50 years, and still is today. The state has worked tirelessly with us as we evaluated our options.

Ultimately, however, it became apparent that to achieve the sustained, profitable growth and efficiencies we require for the decades ahead, our headquarters would have to be located elsewhere.

This article first appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Thursday, January 8, 2015:

The rumors swirling around the Mercedes-Benz headquarters in Montvale, New Jersey were confirmed by the company’s U.S. president, Stephen Cannon, on Tuesday: It would move its U.S. headquarters from Montvale to Atlanta, starting in July. The move would affect about 1,000 employees, about half of whom would likely be offered the opportunity to move with the company.

The decision to move was based on the high-cost and high-tax environment in New Jersey compared to Georgia, although one had to read between the lines of the company’s official statement to ferret that out:

This article first appeared at The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Monday, December 8, 2014:

If Wikipedia is to be believed, the Association for Community Organizations for Reform Now – ACORN – no longer exists:

At its peak ACORN had over 500,000 members and more than 1,200 neighborhood chapters in over 100 cities across the US….

Its U.S. offices filed for Chapter 7 liquidation on November 2, 2010, effectively closing the organization.

Except for this pesky footnote:

Many ACORN members and organizers formed new state-wide organizations.

One of those freshly-minted state-wide organizations is Fast Food Forward (FFF), located in the same building with the same second-floor office address as New York Communities for Change (NYCC), which received nearly $2.5 million from the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) in 2012. The New York Post reported that the NYCC is the dregs of Brooklyn’s former ACORN office.

Far from being deceased or even dormant, FFF’s “organizing director,” Kendall Falls, was

It’s a safe bet that Americans, in compiling their list of blessings for which they were most thankful on Thanksgiving Day, didn’t put George Mitchell at the top. It’s even safer to bet that most Americans don’t even know who he was, or how his life has made life better for nearly every American today.

The Economist had it right: “Few businesspeople have done as much to change the world as George Mitchell.” The founder of Mitchell Energy & Development Company located in Galveston, Texas, Mitchell was responsible for drilling more than 10,000 natural gas wells and, in the process, resetting the world’s energy equation.

Although he passed away over a year ago at the age of 94, Mitchell’s advances in fracking technology are continuing to delight American drivers with

This article will appear as the cover story in the next issue of The New American print magazine:

Travis Wright’s first impressions of Williston, North Dakota, in January 2012 remain vivid. It was bitter cold and the Walmart parking lot was filled to overflowing with campers and RVs whose owners were using them as de facto homes while working in the oil fields. Once inside Walmart, Travis discovered pallets of goods blocking the aisles as the understaffed nighttime crew of stockers simply couldn’t keep up with demand. He quickly learned to do his shopping in the middle of the night when the lines were only 30 minutes long. He learned later that this Walmart in Williston was the highest-grossing one in North America. The local economy was booming to such an extent that even paying $17 an hour for entry-level jobs, store officials couldn’t find enough employees to work for that amount.

Travis — at 6′6″ and 280 pounds, his friends called him Big ‘Un — was also astonished to learn

This article first appeared at TheNewAmerican.com on Tuesday, September 23, 2014:

California Governor Jerry Brown

In response to a challenge posed by his Republican opponent for the governorship in November, California Governor Jerry Brown said:

A lot of people forget the mess that California was in just four years ago. There were 1 million jobs that had been lost. Our budget deficit was astronomical: 27 billion. We hadn’t had a budget on time in probably 10 years.

Brown’s challenger is Republican Neel Kashkari, a practicing Hindu born of Indian parents with a background as a Bush appointee and a former executive with Goldman Sachs. While his political positions on key issues qualify him as a RINO — Republican in Name Only — he is already closing the gap on the once-invincible California governor.

Big government liberals and high spending politicians have converged on Kansas, seeing an opportunity to discredit not only Ronald Reagan’s tax policies but to get even with the Tea Party, which took out a number of “moderate” Republicans in the state Senate over the last two election cycles.

Gov. Sam Brownback (pictured above), a supporter of less government and lower taxes, was able to ride the conservative wave that resulted in tax reform that not only increased an individual taxpayer’s standard deduction from $4,500 to $5,500 but also

This article first appeared at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, September 22, 2014:

Kansas Governor Sam Brownback

Rarely has a governor’s race had such a clear-cut focus. In Kansas, Republican Governor Sam Brownback is facing a strong challenge from Democrat Paul Davis, who is concentrating on Brownback’s tax policies, which were designed to stimulate Kansas’ moribund economy. They’re not working, says Davis, and the tax cuts passed by Brownback 20 months ago need to be repealed to save the Kansas economy and protect government services.

Davis is getting a lot of help from liberals and from moderate Republicans who

This article was first published at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, August 4, 2014:

To Jeffry Bartash, writing for the Wall Street Journal’s MarketWatch, Friday’s jobs report looked awfully good: 209,000 new jobs were added in July and in all the right places: mining, construction, manufacturing, transportation, and warehousing. In addition, there was almost no growth whatsoever in the “government” sector: just 11,000 new jobs were created there last month. This, according to Bartash, means that the economy is on a hot streak, having generated more than 200,000 new jobs every month for the last six months — the first time that has happened since 1997.

Added Bartash:

In the first seven months of 2014 the economy has gained an average of 230,000 jobs. That’s the best stretch of job creation since the [Great Recession] ended in mid-2009 and 19% faster than the pace of hiring in 2013.

This article first appeared at the McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Monday, August 4, 2014:

Criss Jami, the lead singer of the rock band Venus in Arms, may reasonably be accused of having given the president lessons in deceit, especially as they both live in the city where truth-telling is a lost art. Said Jami:

Just because something isn’t a lie does not mean that it isn’t deceptive. A liar knows that he is a liar, but one who speaks mere portions of truth in order to deceive is a craftsman of destruction.

When Friday’s jobs report came out from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), President Obama spoke “mere portions” of its truth:

This article was first published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Monday, July 14, 2014:

Historical government spending in the United States from 1902 to 2010

Back in February the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that the deficit for the 2014 fiscal year would be $514 billion, or about 3 percent of the total economic output of the country. Since this was a nearly 27 percent drop from last year, the implication is that all is well, nothing to see here, move along please. After all, the perception has been that the White House has been spending money faster than at any time in history, running up deficits and the national debt to staggering levels. Half a trillion? Is that all? Pocket change!

Greg Valliere, the chief political strategist for the Potomac Research Group, said at the time that this guaranteed that there would be no pressure for any sort of entitlement reform this year. Jack Lew, Obama’s Treasury Secretary, said the numbers bought some time: “We have a little time to deal with the long term.”

Last week both the White House and the CBO revised downward even further the expected deficit, with Obama taking full credit for the result:

This article was first published at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, July 14, 2014:

Kansas City, Missouri’s Skyline

When Kansas Governor Sam Brownback signed into law the first of several reductions in his state’s income taxes back in May 2012, he wrote:

Our new pro-growth tax policy will be like a shot of adrenaline into the heart of the Kansas economy. It will pave the way to the creation of tens of thousands of new jobs, bring tens of thousands of people to Kansas, and help make our state the best place in America to start and grow a small business.

By cutting the top tax bracket by 25 percent and eliminating taxes on small businesses altogether, he expected great things to happen:

This article was first published at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, June 30, 2014:

Immigrants just arrived from Foreign Countries–Immigrant Building, Ellis Island, New York Harbor.

With the release of the report by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) last week, Director of Research Steven Camarota drove the final nail into the coffin of immigration reform for this year, saying:

Government data show that since 2000 all of the net gain in the number of working-age (16 to 65) people holding a job has gone to immigrants (legal and illegal).

This is remarkable given that native-born Americans accounted for two-thirds of the growth in the total working-age population.… There were still fewer working-age natives holding a job in the first quarter of 2014 than in 2000, while the number of immigrants with a job was 5.7 million above the 2000 level.

All of the net increase in employment went to immigrants in the last 14 years.

This effectively obliterates the assumptions underlying the immigration reform bill SB 744, which was promoted by a bipartisan group of Democrats and Republicans (called by some observers the “Gang of Eight”) and passed by the Senate, 68-32, a year ago last week. That bill was based on several key assumptions: 1) that there is a labor shortage in the country, 2) that there are some jobs only immigrants want, and 3) that higher levels of immigration would stimulate the economy so that everyone, native-born or immigrant, would find more work.

College Students Spending Time Outside (Photo credit: York College of PA)

This article first appeared at The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Wednesday, June 18, 2014:

Mr. Obama has never been very good at math or in getting his facts straight. His misunderstanding of basic laws of economics, however, is breathtaking. Last week, on Tumblr, he announced his latest plans to make it easier for high school graduates to borrow their way into college. First he’ll cap their debt repayments at 10 percent of disposable income. Second, if they default after 20 years, their debts will be forgiven.

This article first appeared at The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Wednesday, June 4, 2014:

When software inventor and now venture capitalist Marc Andreessen looked at investing in Uber just after its launch, he said “Uber is the software [app that] eats taxis.” At the end of its fourth year, Uber is not only eating taxis, but providing thousands of new jobs for people every month. Last week Uber’s founder, Travis Kalanick said:

Just four years ago we set out to build a better option for people to move around cities: to make getting a ride safer, easier and affordable.

But Uber’s positive impact goes further. Hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs are using the platform to build their own small business, resulting in a huge job growth engine….

The first rule to making a startup successful is to determine precisely and exactly who its customers are. With Uber, it’s both the customer needing a lift, and the driver providing it. The service is predicated on a simple premise:

The ride-sharing revolution continues to accelerate, adding 20,000 new jobs every month, according to the head of Uber, the initiator of the revolution. Said Uber’s CEO Travis Kalanick:

Just four years ago we set out to build a better option for people to move around cities: to make getting a ride safer, easier and affordable.

But Uber’s positive impact goes further. Hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs are using the platform to build their own small business, resulting in a huge job growth engine…

When economist Mark Perry’s plane arrived at Reagan National Airport late Tuesday night, May 27, it sat on the runway for another hour and a half waiting for a gate to open. When he finally deplaned at 12:30 a.m., he just wanted to get home and go to bed. But so did everyone else: